2384 Race and Pedagogy Project - Research Archive

October 5, 2005

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “French Feminism in an International Frame.” In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Methuen, 1987. 134-53.

October 05th 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality

At times mobilizing her essay into a description of how to structure “a course on International Feminism,” Spivak uses French Feminism against itself, deconstructing Western Feminism’s typical, benevolent objectification of the Third World Woman or “other” (147). In order to “learn enough about Third World women,” Spivak writes, the “First World feminist must learn to stop feeling privileged as a woman” (136). Naturalization of gender is transformed into privilege by this First World feminism, and this in turn disguises the construction and oppression of women of various locations and situations. As a version of First World feminism, French feminism’s particular strength—an emphasis on female sexual pleasure above and beyond all else—is also its shortcoming. Ignoring race and class, this variety of First World feminism exemplified by Kristeva’s About Chinese Women self-centeredly returns to the question of sexuality and sexual freedom, and by doing so is “symptomatic of a colonialist benevolence” (138). (Read the article)

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Frankenberg, Ruth. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 1993.

October 05th 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality, Whiteness Studies

Arguing that “race shapes white women’s lives” as well as the lives of women of color, Frankenberg asks dominant (white) academic feminism to recognize its relation to both race and racism (1). Analyzing whiteness in material and discursive terms, Frankenberg suggests that whiteness is socially constructed and, while it is frequently racialized as racism, it can in fact become a site of resistance to racism. White Women, Race Matters centers around 30 interviews Frankenberg conducted with white women between 1984 and 1986 in Northern California. Her interviewees were diverse in “age, class, region of origin, sexuality, family situation, and political orientation,” and by reading these interviews critically against themselves, one another, and her own questions, Frankenberg hopes to convey the way in which “race, racial dominance, and whiteness” are “complex, lived experiences” (23, 22). By insisting that racism is a “‘white issue’” as well as an issue that results from the ways in which racial discourses and material relations are reproduced, Frankenberg “attempts […] subversion” by way of an “investigation of self rather than of other(s)” (18). This study calls for its own self investigation and in doing so, models a self-critical model of study that has implicit—rather than explicit—pedagogical ramifications. (Read the article)

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September 22, 2005

Native American Studies Bibliography

September 22nd 2005 Posted to Native American

Adams, David Wallace. Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1995.

Adams, David Wallace. “Fundamental Considerations: The Deep Meaning of Native American Schooling, 1880-1900,” Harvard Educational Review. 58.1 (1988) 1-28. (Read the article)

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September 20, 2005

Sleeter, Christine E. “How White Teachers Construct Race,” Race, Identity and Representation in Education. Cameron McCarthy and Warren Crichlow, Eds. New York: Routledge, 1993, 157-171.

September 20th 2005 Posted to Race, Class and Pedagogy, Public School Initiatives, Whiteness Studies

In this article Sleeter assesses the strengths and weaknesses of multicultural teacher education programs. She begins by noting that the teaching population in the U.S. is becoming increasingly white, even as the student population grows increasingly diverse. Sleeter argues that while multicultural teacher education is somewhat effective at raising white teachers’ awareness of racial issues, the only way to reverse institutional racism is to draw more teachers of color into the teaching profession. (Read the article)

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September 19, 2005

Bourdieu, Pierre and Jean-Claude Passeron. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. 1970. Trans. Richard Nice. London: Sage Publications, 1990.

September 19th 2005 Posted to Race, Class and Pedagogy, The Academy 2155

In this, one of his most influential books, Bourdieu describes how systems of education reproduce the cultural dominance of the ruling class. Drawing on the theories of Marx, Weber and Durkheim, Bourdieu points to the examination, academic language and certification as ways of concealing the class inequality inherent in the School as an institution. While the first half of his book is primarily theoretical, the second half draws on research conducted in French schools and universities. (Read the article)

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Race, critical pedagogy, literacy/composition studies, and higher education bibliography

September 19th 2005 Posted to Race, Literacy and Pedagogy, Race and the Academic Institution, Race, Class and Pedagogy, The Academy

This bibliography, a selection of texts appropriate to this category but which have yet to be abstracted for the site, is a work constantly in progress and should be considered partial. Suggested additions are not only welcomed, but solicited. The title of the bibliography intentionally addresses multiple categories on the RPP site since these three categories are so closely linked. Some of these texts will inevitably cross over into additional categories as well. As titles are abstracted and posted as a separate entry on the RPP site, they will be removed from this list. (Read the article)

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Owens, Louis. “Moonwalking Technoshamans and the Shifting Margin: Decentering the Colonial Classroom.” In Race and the College Classroom. Eds. Bonnie Tusmith and Maureen T. Reddy. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002: 253-263.

September 19th 2005 Posted to Native American, Whiteness Studies

This essay examines the tactical play with Native American stereotypes enacted by Native American students in a course taught by Owens in 1991 at UC Santa Cruz. This course, devoted to the Native American novel, was unusual in Owens’ experience because the Native American students made up a significant portion of the class; they took advantage of this situation by exercising their knowledge and authority with the cultural material in such a way as to displace the expectations, including what Owens calls the “literary tourism,” of the participating EuroAmerican students. The essay shifts between an analysis of the Native American students’ discourse, and an examination of the trauma negotiated by the EuroAmerican students. (Read the article)

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hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994.

September 19th 2005 Posted to Race, Literacy and Pedagogy, Race and the Academic Institution, Race, Gender and Sexuality, The Pleasures of Teaching Race, Race, Class and Pedagogy, African American, The Academy

In this indispensable and highly influential book, bell hooks (the writing persona of Gloria Watson) writes essays in the varying forms of feminist personal narratives and/or dialogues, based on her experience as a black woman (both student and teacher) in an educational system dominated by a white male ethos. The essays all strive to break down that structure of domination. “Multilayered, then, these essays are meant to stand as testimony, bearing witness to education as the act of freedom.” (11)

Hooks’ work is informed by both feminist pedagogies and the Marxist critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire (see his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, abstracted on this site). In the introduction hooks discusses where these pedagogies took her and also the point at which she believes they failed. They lent her the tools to eschew the submission to authority and rote memorization occurring in what Freire calls the “banking system of education” and to practice in their place critical thinking and a democratic classroom engagement with the object of knowledge. But hooks suggests that even these critical systems fail to acknowledge the radical value of the pleasure of learning, particularly in higher education. (Read the article)

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Tsolidis, Georgina. Schooling, Diaspora and Gender: Being Feminist and Being Different. Feminist Educational Thinking Ser. Philadelphia: Open UP, 2001.

September 19th 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality

Tsolidis argues that “schooling, particularly secondary schooling, is a significant site for processes of identification,” and that gender is a particularly significant part of these processes (10). Arguing as a feminist but from a diasporic position as an ethnic minority in Australia, Tsolidis endorses a feminism that does not “assume a unitary voice”: “My overall intention is to argue that it is possible and valuable to be both feminist and different” (3, 2). She writes as an antiracist feminist, and turns to education as a significant site for “potential means of changing both society and the lives of individuals” (4). Because schooling provides such an important context for adolescent identity formation, Tsolidis’ focus on secondary education has implications for identity—and society—at large. (Read the article)

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Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne. “Expanding the Categories of Race and Sexuality in Lesbian and Gay Studies.” Professions of Desire: Lesbian and Gay Studies in Literature. Ed. George E. Haggerty and Bonnie Zimmerman. New York: MLA, 1995. 124-35.

September 19th 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality, The Academy

Yarbro-Bejarano writes about the continuing marginalization of lesbian and gay issues within American ethnic studies, and notes that the underlying problem is the way in which categorical areas of study “focus on one issue, whether it be gender, race, class, or sexuality, as if it existed separately from the others” (127). Instead of employing a strategy such as “inclusion,” Yarbro-Bejarano suggests “a relational theory of difference that examines identity formation in the dynamic interpenetration of gender, race, sexuality, class, and nation” (128). (Read the article)

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